Skip to footer

At least eight dead in Florida church van crash

The van, with 18 people on board, was returning to Fort Pierce from a weekend gathering in southwest Florida.

|
Luis M. Alvarez/AP
Workers pull a van out of a canal at the intersection of US 27 and State Road 78 West, Monday, March 30, 2015, near Moore Haven, Fla.
  • By Matt Sedensky Associated Press

| Moore Haven, Fla.

A church van ran through a stop sign, crossed all four lanes of a rural highway and crashed into in a canal, killing eight people and injuring 10 Monday in southwest Florida, authorities said.

The van was heading back to church in Fort Pierce, north of West Palm Beach on the Atlantic coast, after a weekend convention in Fort Myers, according to the Florida Highway Patrol.

Eighteen people were on board when the van crashed at the intersection about 12:30 a.m. Monday, said Lt. Gregory S. Bueno of the Highway Patrol. The driver and seven passengers died. The 10 other passengers were taken to four hospitals.

Among them was a 4-year-old child in stable condition. At least two patients were classified as trauma alerts, and at least one passenger had been released. The conditions of the other passengers ranged from serious to stable.

Bueno said that at the time of the crash, it wasn't foggy at the crash scene in Glades County, west of Lake Okeechobee.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to At least eight dead in Florida church van crash
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2015/0330/At-least-eight-dead-in-Florida-church-van-crash
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe